Introduction There are many commercial scenery packages around, but very few are based solely on the sights and buildings of major cities. Aerosoft's Manhattan, reviewed in March 2004, is one such example. Another is Lago's Venice scenery, reviewed in AVSIM in September 2003. Visual Flight's London is the latest addition to this small but select group. It is a scenery of London from the West End in the west to the Docklands area in the east, an area of about 12 miles by 6 miles, and extensively populated with buildings.
This area includes the Parliament and Ministry buildings, the Royal parks and Palaces, the shopping streets and Theatreland, the financial skyscrapers of the City of London, the rejuvenated Docklands out to the East, and, of special interest to virtual pilots, the unique London City (EGLC) airport, of which more later. Installation & Documentation You can either order the CD, or alternatively, get the 24Mb download from the Visual Flight website. Payment is via PayPal or SWREG. Once the payment is processed, the CD is mailed off to you, or alternatively you get the instructions for the download. Once the installation process starts, it asks a number of questions. However, there are good reasons for this. People who fly in UK virtual airspace are very fortunate, in that as well as having the default MS scenery and airports, they also have the option of the UK2000 complete set of British Airports, a number of other individual airport sceneries, and Horizon Simulation's Photographic Scenery for England and Wales. The installation program therefore needs to know whether you already have a version of London City Airport that you want to keep, and whether it needs to "knit" the ends of its River Thames into the very inaccurate default MS river or into the much more authentic Photographic Scenery version. It also asks you whether you want to install the optional AI River Traffic, and have barges and tourist boats chugging up and down the river. It does stress that this is optional and warns you that "Choosing to install AI River Traffic can seriously affect frame rates." They're not kidding. When I installed the River Traffic, it turned my reasonably high-end machine from a sprightly athletic youngster into a wheezing old arthritic. Although the boats were nice, they weren't that nice, and I decided to dispense with them and keep the frames per second instead. So the installation process was a bit like my experience, as a Brit, trying to buy a donut in a U.S. Dunkin' Donuts. You can't just walk in and ask for "a donut", you have to withstand a battery of questions about flavor and topping before they'll allow you to take your donut and go. Having said that, and to be fair to Visual Flight, the questions were clear and logical, I got them all right first time, and the installation went smoothly. However I do have one grumble, and it's a similar grumble I have with some other addon suppliers. When it comes to files in my FS9 folders, I'm a great believer in "Everything in its place, and a place for everything". Call me fussy, but I don't think I'm alone. And the correct place for addon scenery is, not surprisingly, the folder entitled "Addon Scenery". Or, at a push, the regular "Scenery" folder. It's certainly not in "C:\Program Files\VisualFlight\VisualFlightLondon", next to Word and Adobe Acrobat and all that other stuff. Otherwise I'm going to forget about it next time I backup my FS9 files. The documentation supplied is very clear and comprehensive, with particularly useful sections on getting the best performance. For those questions not addressed by by the manual, there is a lively Forum where the developers are much in evidence.
The Scenery
To create a scenery for an entire city area is a very ambitious project. An airport is relatively simple, it needs grass, tarmac, and a set of terminal buildings. For an area of countryside, a Landclass file or some photographic terrain can create the right effect over a large region without a vast effort. But to take an area of several square miles, and densely populate it with unique buildings, especially when so many of them are well-known landmarks? Now that is a serious amount of work. It's never been Microsoft's strongest area. Not surprisingly, Seattle and the Puget Sound have always looked true-to-life, but their rendition of London looks like global warming started 100 years ago, with lakes and lagoons replacing what was once the River Thames. Famously, in FS2002, they placed the Millennium Dome opposite the Houses of Parliament - (if only; it would have reminded our legislators how much taxpayers' money they wasted on this now-unused folly). So Visual Flight don't exactly have much to beat, but at the same time, that's an awful lot of buildings. Let's have a look and see how well they've done. Well, they faced a choice. They could have chosen to populate this 50+ square mile area with every building there is in real life. However that would take any developer through to about 2017, which is just as well, because we'd have to wait that long for a machine that could run it any faster than one frame every second Tuesday.
Alternatively, they could have gone for just the landmark buildings, with some sparse generic autogen buildings to fill the gaps in between. However that would be similar to the default MS London.
What they have in fact done is to create a good balance between the two. There is a sufficient number of buildings to create the impression of a dense metropolis at 500 feet, but not so many that impact frame rates to any extent. There are the famous landmark buildings in a good level of detail, plus a wide variety of office and shop buildings, apartment buildings and low-density housing. Whilst you can see that the designer has re-used buildings wherever possible, there's still a very convincing variety overall.
For anyone who knows London reasonably well, you can fly all over this scenery and not see anything out of place. Certainly, when trying to keep a helicopter on an even keel, the view of the rooftops and streets as they glide past the window is enough to give that feeling of "being there". And if you want to fly perilously close to the buildings, the texture detail is still there - not enough to kill the frame rate, but enough to see which windows in an office block are open, or to look down the fan of an air-conditioning unit. And it's great, finally, to see the River Thames follow its true-to-life course.
There are only two things that look strange with this scenery, and there is probably little that Visual Flight alone can do about them. The first is that some of the river banks look very high. This is caused by Microsoft's default river level being about 15 metres higher than in real life, which in turn forces up the level of the surrounding terrain. Visual Flight have set the river level at zero feet, so as to match the sea in the estuary; the retreating water level left some high river banks, and a small waterfall in that part of the Thames where Visual Flight and Microsoft meet up (which incidentally is in the middle of the course for the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race; now that would liven up an otherwise dull event!) The second is that the default landclass urban texture can look strange and random underneath the carefully-placed buildings. The generic MS texture has parks where there aren't any in real life, roads where there should be parks, and so on. However, people who also own Horizon Simulation's VFR Photographic Scenery can activate this, and suddenly the underlying texture seems to fit much better, doesn't look quite so random, and the colours blend better. Personally I also prefer the rather muddy-looking Thames with boats which seems more true to life. I believe that Horizon Simulation own the exclusive flight simulation rights to the one complete set of England and Wales aerial photography, so they're the only people who could help out here. I have been in contact with them and suggested that it's a situation where Horizon Simulation and Visual Flight could combine and package something together for this scenery, as it would benefit the flightsimmer and help to sell both products. (Horizon Simulation have responded positively to this suggestion, so let's hope we see some developments in this area soon)
The Heliport and Airport We're getting a bit low on fuel, so let's find somewhere to land. For helicopters, the main London Heliport is to the south-west of the area covered by this scenery, and of course you can land on Horseguards' Parade if you get Royal permission, but Visual Flight have constructed the landing pad on the roof of the Royal London Hospital out in the East End, so let's get in a Virgin-sponsored helicopter ambulance and land there.
Once we're down, it looks like any other rooftop heliport; a landing pad and a portacabin. Still, it does the job, and the view is impressive... However, if fixed-wing is your thing, particularly small passenger aircraft, then this scenery has real treat in store for you. London City Airport , (EGLC), was built some twenty years ago, as part of the regeneration of the dying Docklands area. In between the parallel Royal Albert and King George V docks, the warehouses were removed and an airport created. The runway is 1508 meters in length, which isn't long, and if you overshoot there are grooved-concrete areas at both ends to help you to brake to a stop before you finish up in the water. Not only that, but the approach is obviously over a built-up area, so the glideslope into the touchdown area is set at 5.5 degrees, almost double the normal angle. Then there are the obstructions; the Canary Wharf complex near the approach to Runway 10, the overhead power cables to the side...not surprisingly, only a few aircraft types use this airport, types like the BAe146, Fokker 50, ATR and Fairchild Dornier 328.
The approach, then, is a considerable challenge. The flare needs to be well judged; because of the angle at which you approach the concrete, the temptation is to flare too early. However, that would be a mistake, because there's not a lot of runway, and you don't want to be floating above it. So the technique is to delay the flare, then flare decisively, make sure you get the wheels down quickly, and use all the braking and reverse thrust at your disposal. Once down, you will appreciate what a nice little airport this is. Unlike many airports, it does not stop at the boundary fence. Instead, you see the rest of Visual Flight London - office buildings, housing and apartment blocks, road flyovers, power lines, the Canary Wharf complex and Millennium Dome in the distance. All of this gives a great feeling of perspective, that you're actually in an airport in the middle of a rejuvenated docklands area. And they've done a particularly good job on the docks themselves, as can be seen from the shot above - the water level is exactly right. My only criticism is that the approach and runway lights are a bit intense, even on a bright sunny day. Performance Visual Flight did issue a updated release of this product earlier in 2005, which made improvements to performance and frame rates, and it is that release that is being reviewed here. With my set-up, I have all the sliders to the right, and 100% Ultimate Traffic AI (which, in the London area, is a lot of planes!). On the ground at London City I was getting 20-25 fps; at 500feet, heading west, passing over all those buildings, it reduced to 15-20; once I got beyond the boundary of Visual Flight London, into the land of the generic autogen, it increased to 25-30. So the effect of this scenery on any configuration should be an approximately 33% framerate drop, which is not excessive considering all that it contains. Summary This is a very enjoyable scenery. If you know London well, there is little that will look strange or out of place. If you don't know it, a helicopter sight-seeing trip would be an excellent way to learn its geography. Helicopter pilots can have a lot of fun here - not only is there a dedicated roof-top heliport, but you can also land in parks and squares, surrounded by authentic-looking buildings to give you the feeling of "being there". However fixed-wing pilots are not neglected, as there is the unique London City Airport, and its equally unique approach. There is a great deal of very competent work that has gone into the production of this scenery, no doubt involving much tramping round the streets taking digital photographs, as well as at the screen of a PC. Certainly the many individual buildings look very authentic, even when quite close up, yet frame rates are still acceptable. What Visual Flight have done is to create a very detailed city scenery and to embed within it a very authentic airport scenery. As such they have created something that is a "natural upward progression from today's state-of-the-art", and this is reflected in its rating. It's certainly a scenery that I'll keep going back to. (McDonnell Douglas / Boeing Explorer 902 by Linden Hoyle; Virgin Air Ambulance repaint by Brian McIntyre) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
